The result more than fulfilled the prediction. The second day after this visit the Prince de Soubise was in a condition to receive some friends. In the evening he got up and walked about the room. He was in good spirits, and even had sufficient appetite to ask for the wing of a chicken. But, in spite of his insistence, it was necessary to refuse him what he so much desired, since an absolute abstention from solid food was one of the prescriptions of the “doctor.”
On the fourth day the patient was convalescent, but it was not till the evening of the fifth that he was permitted to have his wing of a chicken. “No one,” says Figuier, “in the Hôtel de Soubise had the least idea that Cagliostro was the doctor who attended the prince. His identity was only disclosed after the cure, when his name, already famous, ceased to be regarded any longer as that of a charlatan.”
V
The secret of these astonishing cures, by far the most wonderful of Cagliostro’s prodigies, has given rise to a great deal of futile discussion. For he never cured in public, like Mesmer; nor would he consent to give any explanation of his method to the doctors and learned academicians, who treated him with contempt born of envy—as the pioneers of science, with rare exceptions, have always been treated.
From the fact that he became celebrated at about the same time as Mesmer, many have regarded them as rivals, and declared that the prestige of both is to be traced to the same source. According to this point of view, Cagliostro, being more encyclopedic than Mesmer, though less scientific in manipulating the agent common to both, had in some way generalized magnetism, so to speak. His cures, however, were far more astonishing than Mesmer’s, for they were performed without passes or the use of magnets and magnetic wands. Neither did he heal merely by touching, like Gassner, nor by prayers, exorcisms, and the religious machinery by which faith is made active; though very probably the greater part of his success was due, like Mrs. Eddy’s, to the confident tone in which he assured his patients of the certainty of their recovery.
Cagliostro’s contemporaries, on the other hand, to whom the mechanism of Christian Science and the attributes of hypnotism—since so well tested by Dr. Charcot—were unknown, sought a material explanation of his cures in the quack medicines he concocted. The old popular belief in medicinal stones and magical herbs was still prevalent. One writer of the period pretended to know that Cagliostro’s “Elixir Vitæ” was composed of “magical herbs and gold in solution.” Another declared it to be the same as the elixir of Arnauld de Villeneuve, a famous alchemist of the Middle Ages, whose prescription consisted of “a mixture of pearls, sapphires, hyacinths, emeralds, rubies, topazes and diamonds, to which was added the scraping of the bones of a stag’s heart.”
Equally fantastic were the properties attributed to these panaceas by those who owed their restoration to health to Cagliostro. The following story, repeated everywhere—and believed, too, by many—gave the notoriety of a popular modern advertisement to the “Wine of Egypt.”
A great lady, who was also, unfortunately for her, an old one, and was unable to resign herself to the fact, was reported to have consulted Cagliostro, who gave her a vial of the precious liquid with the strictest injunction to take two drops when the moon entered its last quarter. Whilst waiting for this period to arrive the lady who desired to be rejuvenated shut up the vial in her wardrobe, and the better to insure its preservation informed her maid that it was a remedy for the colic. Fatal precaution! By some mischance on the following night, the maid was seized with the very malady of which her mistress had spoken. Remembering the remedy so fortuitously at hand she got up, opened the wardrobe, and emptied the vial at a draught.
The next morning she went as usual to wait on her mistress, who looked at her in surprise and asked her what she wanted. Thinking the old lady had had a stroke in the night, she said—
“Ah, madame, don’t you know me? I am your maid.”